Dear Troll 'John Oputa':
Your attempts to troll are amusingly
pathetic. At some point in time, I highly suggest that you pick up a
copy of Strunk and White's Elements of Style, a thesaurus, and the AP
Style manual. Those three items will assist you dramatically.
Please, allow me to expound upon the
reason why you are in need of these three books. You wrote:
Dear Miskell,Your earliest response
would be appreciated on the regards.
I am Mr John Oputa, a legal
practitioner in Togo Republic West Africa
and personal attorney to Engineer
A.Miskell, a deceased client of mine
who died in a car accident along Kara
express Road On the 21st of
April 2008, with, his wife and their
only daughter.
I have contacted you to assist in the
distribution of the funds left
valued at US$8.5 million.
For more explanations please reply to
my private email johnoputa55@gmail.com
Yours faithfully
John Oputa.
Line one of your missive is a glaring
error. The greeting of a letter is to be presented upon its own line.
Additionally, your sentence is passive. If you are in the business of
exhorting people to do things, you must use more active voice. As
such, consider rephrasing the sentence thusly:
I would appreciate your earliest
response on the matter.
Line two of your letter is simply
atrocious. Mr. Oputa, if you are truly an educated man who is versed
in English as well as your native language, you would have recognized
that your run-on sentence is awkward to read, at best. If you wish to
use this in the future, please, rephrase this into two separate
sentences. This does not fatigue the reader's eye and maintains
active voice. Maintaining active voice serves to engage your reader
and makes them more pliant to your persuasions.
Additionally, Mr. Oputa, you failed to
use proper punctuation in your title. This does not bode well for
someone who is of your supposed level of education. I will not state
the obvious errors you have made in capitalization, the use of
comma-splicing, or your poor execution of conveying the urgency of
the situation.
Line three of your letter is by far the
most legible of the missive. At the same time, however, your passive
voice continues to plague your writing. I will not insult your
intelligence by presuming to give you a better phrasing. I am certain
that this simple error is quite easily resolved with a little bit of
thought.
Line four of your letter is marginally
better then line three. Failure to use proper punctuation at the end
of the line is something that I can forgive. Inserting e-mail
addresses into the final clause of a sentence is difficult and can
make punctuation problematic.
Mr. Oputa, your failure to impress me
with your missive most assuredly means that you will fail to impress
me in other areas. If you, an educated man, can not write a simple
e-mail to me that properly expresses the urgency of your mission or
presents a compelling argument for me to contact you, I highly doubt
you can muster up anything truly of interest. If you wish to try
again, I will be happy to assist you.
The fee for my services as a
beta-reader and editor begins at $100/hr. This can be negotiated,
provided you are accomplished enough in the language to engage in
such a discussion. If you are unable to do so, Mr. Oputa, I would
suggest that you speak with your colleague, the most unimpressively
named Tom.
I am most disappointed. Mr. Oputa. If I
were grading your work, I would give you an 'F' and have you re-write
this letter until it is correct. At which time, I would then have you
copy it thirty times, to ensure that the proper methodology of how to
compose correspondence is burned into your feeble brain.
No comments:
Post a Comment